"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven!"
William Wordsworth

His perspective at the beginning of the French Revolution;
this spirit of enthusiasm didn't last long.

"Liberty leading the People" by Eugène Delacroix

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp The French Revolution
is clearly one of the central events in Western civilization - a period
of history whose characters and events have always fascinated me. The
more moderate American Revolution, in comparison, was much less influential
upon the world of its time - even if it was more successful and less
bloody. I would argue it was more successful precisely because it was
more moderate and less murderous than the French Revolution.

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp But the French Revolution ironically
was a failed revolution: Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité quickly
descended to the towering figure of Robespierre and his Reign of
Terror as the revolution spun out control and began to murder itself.
First the royalists were beheaded, next the moderate girondists, and
by then the violence and suspicion was totally out of hand as the
revolution devoured itself. In my opinion, after they started beheading
the moderate Girondists it was only a matter of time before everyone
else went to the guillotine. 26 years after the "Declaration of
the Rights of Man" was written up, a Bourbon once more sat on the
throne as the King of France - that is what I mean by "failed" Revolution.
Since 1793, France has had no less than 11 subsequent constitutions
(while the United States still uses their first). This is what
I mean about moderation and political stability. It is the legacy
of those revolutions so different in style, substance, and in legacy.

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp During one rapacious stretch of mindless
revolutionary paranoia, 1,376 individuals were guillotined in only
47 days. The moderate girondist Mme. Jeanne Roland de la
Platiere's last words before her death on the guillotine were: "O
liberty! how they have played with you." She put it well, in
my opinion. Or Camille Desmoulins, writing to his wife from prison,
claiming, "J'avais rêvé une république que tout le monde eût
adorée. Je n'ai pu croire que les hommes fussent si féroces et
si injustes." I always much preferred the moderate Montesqieu
and Lafayette to Robespierre and his fellow radicals. Not surprisingly,
they did not do so well in the French Revolution which is a prime
example of Gresham's law of political morality: the bad drives
out the good as everyone becomes corrupted while political life
becomes not unlike the Hobbesian war of all against all in "a
perpetual and restless desire for power, that ceaseth only in death."

Executioner of King Louis XVI shows the head of the King of France
to crowd.
The king was only one of the thousands of victims of Robespierre
and his "Committee of Public Safety" and "Revolutionary Tribunal"

"...and never heads enough..."

Domestic carnage, now filled the whole year
With feast-days, old men from the chimney-nook,
The maiden from the busom of her love,
The mother from the cradle of her babe,
The warrior from the field - all perished, all -
Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks,
Head after head, and never heads enough
For those that bade them fall.

William Wordsworth

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Wordsworth came to suffer the disillusion
of young revolutionaries in all ages who discover that in shedding
an ocean of blood they have more often than not done more harm than
good. If the French revolution was the end of monarchy and aristocratic
privilege and the emergence of the common man and democratic rights,
it was also the beginnings of modern totalitarian government and
large-scale executions of "enemies of the People" by impersonal government
entities (Robespierre's "Committee of Public Safety"). This legacy
would not reach its fullest bloom until the tragic arrival of the
German Nazis and Soviet and Chinese communists of the 20th century.

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp In fact, Rousseau has been called the
precursor of the modern pseudo-democrats such as Stalin and Hitler
and the "people's democracies." His call for the "sovereign" to
force men to be free if necessary in the interests of the "General
Will" harks back to the Lycurgus of Sparta instead of to the pluralism
of Athens; the legacy of Rousseau is Robespierre and the radical
Jacobins of the Terror who followed and worshipped him passionately.
In the 20th century, his influence is further felt by tyrants who
would arouse the egalitarian passions of the masses not so much in
the interests of social justice as social control. Let us take Rousseau
for the literary genius he was and appreciate his contribution to
history; let us look at his political philosophy with great skepticism.

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Can you force a person or people to be
free? Can one person - or small group of people - truly discern a
clear "General Will" which represents the entire people? Is this
not in practice a call for dictatorship? Can we read "The Social
Contract" and find any of the spirit of Athens and parliamentary
democracy in those pages? I cannot. It seems to me all Sparta and
the austere egalitarianism of the collectivist society and ideological
justifications for the nightmare regimes of modern totalitarianism.

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Rousseau presages the rise of the Romantic
movement in art and caused a sensation among the aristocrats of Bourbon
France. Later on Napoleon is supposed to have claimed, "If there
had been no Rousseau, there would have been no Revolution, and without
the Revolution, I should have been impossible." Stalin
and Hitler could say the same in recognizing their debt to the concept
of "the Sovereign" of Rousseau and its mystical identification with
the people. 200 years later we have only millions and millions of
innocents murdered in the "name of the people," etc. ad nauseam.
Robespierre looked upon him like a spiritual father. If I had to
choose between two evils, I would choose the opportunistic diplomats
such as Maurice de Talleyrand of France, Clemens Metternich of Austria,
Tsar Alexander of Russia, or Lord Castlereagh of England over Napoleon
and Revolutionary France. For Napoleon was only the seed which was
to bloom widely in the bloody 20th century in dynamic dictators like
Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. "Nobody can rule guiltlessly," claimed
Saint-Just. This may be true, but political violence is the worst
evil of this century of spectacular crimes and Robespierre, to my
knowledge, was the first European intellectual to put forth this
absurd idea that terror is the best and most effective manner for
bringing about "justice."

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp The French Revolution was the deserving
death knell for the old system of monarchy in Europe. Unfortunately,
in too many places the governments which replaced ancien regimes was
as bad or worse than those which preceeded them (from Napoleon on
up to Lenin and the fascists). The chaos and violence which Napoleon
helped bring about has (let us hope) only in the last fifty years
been succesfully worked out of the European system. Let us learn
from the past, so that we may not repeat its errors. Let the 20th
century (and the Jacobin Terror) be a warning!

...'Twas in truth an hour
Of universal ferment; mildest men
Were agitated; and commotions, strife
Of passion and opinion fill'd the walls
Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.
The soil of common life was at that time
Too hot to tread upon; oft said I then,
And not then only, 'what a mockery this
Of history; the past and that to come!
Now do I feel how I have been deceived,
Reading of Nations and their works, in faith,
Faith given to vanity and emptiness;
Oh! laughter for the Page that would reflect
To future times the face of what now is!'

William Wordsworth

The mysterious and menacing figure of Maximillien Robespierre;"The government of liberty is the despotism of liberty against
tyranny."
Robespierre's legacy of "despotism" was not to bloom fully until the pogroms
of the 20th century.
Of course, Robespierre himself was guillotined during the Terror.

Robespierre's Malevolent Legacy:
Terror as "Justice"

"Terror is nought but prompt, severe, inflexible
justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is less a particular
principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy
applied to the most pressing needs of the fatherland."
Maximillien Marie Isidore de Robespierre
Address, National Convention, 1794

"Robespierre, with his cruel moral relativism,
embodied the cardinal sin of all revolution, the hearlessness of ideas."
Paul Johnson
"The Spectator"

"He [the revolutionary] is damned always to do that which is most
repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer, to sacrifice lambs so that
no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that
they may learn not to let themselves by whipped, to strip himself of
every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge
the hatred of mankind because of his love for it - an abstract and geometric
love."
Arthur Koestler
"Darkness at Noon"

"The French Revolution had opened an era of intense politicization.
Perhaps the most significant characteristic of the dawning modern world,
and in this respect it was a true child of Rousseau, was the tendency
to relate everything to politics. In Latin America, every would-be plunderer
or ambitious bandit now called himself a "a liberator"; murderers killed
for freedom, thieves stole for the people."
Paul Johnson
"Modern Times"

"What we learn from the study of the Great [French] Revolution is
that it was the source of all the present communist, anarchist and socialist
conceptions."
Prince Petr Kropotkin
Russian naturalist, author and soldier
writing in 1909 on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution